Conclusion

If you need a NAS for yourself or to share with your family, the N5810 Pro is a responsible choice. At $699, it costs more than many five-bay appliances. However, its main feature will save you money on building a shared storage system the right way. NAS products used in homes to deliver multimedia content and to store important files like pictures and music really should have some sort of power loss protection in place. A number of companies sell battery backup systems. However, the small, home-focused units are around the same size as a NAS and cost more than $100 in most cases. Pulling battery backup into the NAS itself is a better way to manage power failures, while reducing the footprint of the components.

The same is true for small office environments without dedicated system administrators. The Thecus N5810 Pro can be set up quickly and easily. Its on-board battery helps simplify configuration and is a feature simply not offered by any other product in this class. SMBs can also make better use of the five built-in network ports that bring Ethernet redundancy or performance improvements if set-up properly. The expanded network capabilities are features that most home users will not take advantage of. But businesses can use them to improve performance in the office.

Moving beyond simple storage tasks, the N5810 Pro can run applications on the appliance, though most users should stick to the basics like BitTorrent, Usenet management or cloud access functions. The Intel SoC just isn't powerful enough to run databases, even if a dedicated application server uses the NAS to store its data. Users could run a few virtual machines with the N5810 Pro acting as the storage if the workload is fairly light. In short, don't expect the processor to scale well under heavy workloads like a system with a more powerful processor might.

At $699, Thecus' N5810 Pro is an excellent choice for the roles it is designed to serve. The software is easy to manage, its performance is more than acceptable and users will discover a large number of useful features right out of the box. This model's main selling point is its mini-UPS, and that's a fairly unique capability in the NAS space.

Typically battery backups are SLA (sealed lead acid) which is most likely why they don't get packaged with NAS systems - they're heavy, they're a dangerous good by transportation and shipping rules, they expand and can release gasses when under load and charged. The upside? They have way more capacity than that of a lithium-ion as shown in this little unit, they (probably) cost much less, and they last longer (5+ years vs 2-3). In terms of a NAS though, the capacity isn't really an issue if the only thing the NAS is doing is shutting down to avoid data loss/corruption.

I'm not sure if I've just missed it - but: How many drives of what brand and capacity, in what raid mode were used for the testing?

It would be good to single this information out into one of the section headings. It may be redundant as you presumably standardise this across NAS of a given bay capacity - but it would still be useful.

This is an impressive device. I'd definitively give it a try for home office solutions. The only downside I can see to it is that if the internal memory were to die (flash, ram), the backups are probably gone unless they keep using the same system/setting organization and it is forward compatible with other similar systems.

5 years is a long time and unless they intend to have the same product line around for a long time, it will either be EOL or replaced with an updated version.